Scientists Reveal How to Hack your Brain (Neuroplasticity)

The year is 1995. Cs is an eight-year-old girl who went on vacation to the beach with her parents.   The whole family was looking forward to the trip and enjoyed the good weather.   But little did the family know that her entire life would change during this trip. One morning, the girl's foot began to tremble.  Her parents were worried and rushed to the nearest hospitals where doctors performed the first tests. When doctors made the diagnosis, the family was devastated. CS she suffered from a rare disorder called rasmussen encephalitis.   In this disease, the immune system attacks parts of the

brain

, causing seizures.   Doctors proposed the only viable option to stop the seizures: removing half of the

brain

.

A few years later, Cs she had just finished high school and achieved several notable honors with the removal of parts of the brain. Wow, how is that possible? My name is Clemens and today we will talk about

neuroplasticity

, how we can make ourselves smarter and how we can fight Alzheimer's disease. Let's go back to the beginning of the story. The girl suffered from a rare disorder called Rasmussen encephalitis. The exact causes of this disease are still debated, but somehow the immune system recognizes the brain itself as an intruder and begins to attack it.   What is quite special is that often only half of the brain is attacked.   The affected brain regions swell and partially die.

This process then causes seizures. In cs' case, the right side of the brain was being attacked and therefore the only viable option was to perform a hemispherectomy, meaning they had to remove the diseased half of the brain.   At first, the parents did not agree with this procedure because, of course, there are many risks if we remove certain regions of the brain. They feared that the surgery would change her personality, destroy her memory and leave her permanently disabled. You see, the right hemisphere of the brain performs many important tasks and is involved in attention, memory, reasoning, and coordination of the left arm and leg.

Having local brain damage can already be harmful, but losing the entire right side of the brain can have unforeseen consequences. Then the family returned home.   But then her condition worsened. She experienced up to 150 seizures a day, vomited and had many problems. So they finally had to agree to the surgery. The surgery lasted 14 hours and then... the boy woke up. She had a horrible headache but otherwise her body tolerated the surgery extremely well. Her memory was also good and her attention span was good and after rehabilitation she learned to control her left arm and leg. During the following years she not only finished school, but also university and became a speech therapist.  You can read her story online, the link is in the description.

So, in some way, our brain could almost completely compensate for the loss of proper health.   As?! As we grow in size, our brain also grows, but there comes a time when our brain is no longer largely producing new brain cells. But even though we don't constantly develop new brain cells, we can still learn new things. We can learn new skills, new languages, learn to drive a car, or learn fun facts from

your

favorite little science YouTuber (thank you). And the fact that we can do all that is due to a phenomenon called

neuroplasticity

. Neuroplasticity means that our brain cells form new brain connections.

Every time we learn something new, certain brain cells activate at the same time. If we now repeat the same thing a couple of times, the same brain cells activate over and over again, triggering the formation of new connections. Neuroplasticity can also be summarized in the phrase “cells that fire together wire together.” And this phrase is used so frequently in biology lectures that it can be called the despacito of neuroscience. witty joke check. In the aforementioned case, we have seen a girl who has lost her entire right brain hemisphere, but after a time of training the neuroplasticity of her remaining brain hemisphere led to new brain connections and she was able to partially compensate the areas lost brain.

Of course, neuroplasticity does not only occur in such dramatic cases, but every time we learn something new.   Neuroplasticity is amazing, but can we use it, for example, to learn more efficiently? And can we use neuroplasticity to combat Alzheimer's disease? You know where this is going. Imagine you are on the streets of London, United Kingdom. Take a deep breath, ah, the air pollution. London is a historic city and, like many historic cities, it has complicated streets.   On these streets we find a special class of taxi drivers. Taxi drivers drive on the streets all day, they have to navigate busy streets and they have to find shortcuts.   A couple of years ago,

scientists

performed magnetic resonance imaging to analyze the hippocampus of taxi drivers.

The hippocampus is a part of the brain that is involved in memory and navigation. What

scientists

discovered is that the hippocampus of taxi drivers is larger than normal. Navigating the streets of London all day has changed his brain in the sense that neuroplasticity has been activated making the hippocampus larger. And the fact is that we can all activate neuroplasticity to rewire our brains and make us "smarter." And the good thing is that we can do it and start at any time, there is no age limit for that. So if you want to get started, here's what you can do: The first thing is to learn new things (obviously).

By default, learning new things creates new brain connections. But in the end you will not only learn new skills, but the resulting neuroplasticity will also change

your

brain overall.  For example, learning a second language has been shown to facilitate the formation of new brain connections between various brain regions. In other words, learning a second language not only helps you with your reading comprehension, but also with multitasking and problem solving. Learning a second language has also been shown to improve people's attention span. Here we hypothesize that a bilingual person must actively suppress one language when speaking another.

So neuroplasticity can lead to more global changes in the brain.   In addition to actively learning new things, you can also trigger neuroplasticity with the right diet and exercise. Some studies suggest that diets rich in polyphenols promote neuroplasticity in several brain regions. Polyphenols are found in fruits, vegetables and tea and are suggested to support brain cell metabolism.  This and in general helps brain cells function and form connections more easily. Fasting has also been shown to activate pathways in the brain that help improve neuroplasticity. At this time it appears that intermittent fasting provides the most benefits. Exercising regularly also promotes neuroplasticity.   People who exercise regularly throughout their lives have a larger overall volume in their hippocampus and a larger frontal, temporal, and perito lobe.

And as I'm writing the script right now, it's really amazing how many positive effects a healthy lifestyle can have. I mean, think about our video on aging. We have seen how diets, fasting and exercise could help slow down the aging of cells and here the same mechanism also helped neuroplasticity. So I guess we should try to stay in shape, guys. And last but not least, stress management also helps promote neuroplasticity.   Of course, life is stressful, we all know that, but we can try to minimize stress to some extent, at least because this can also help shape our brain.

In one study, participants underwent meditation training for eight weeks. Their brains were scanned before and after training and it was found that those who reported a reduction in stress also had a reduction in their amygdala.   The amygdala is the region of the brain that manages emotions and also has to deal with stress and it appears that neuroplasticity has actively shaped this region from stress management.   As you see, we can all trigger neuroplasticity and help train our brain. And this could not only help us in our daily lives, but also help us fight age-related diseases. Dementia is one of the greatest medical challenges of the 21st century.

More than 55 million people worldwide suffer from some form of dementia and this number is expected to increase. Alzheimer's disease is the most common form of dementia. We all know how terrible this disease is. We may forget where we left our keys or feel a little irritated. It is increasingly difficult to learn new things and we become more confused. Inside the brain we begin to find small damages that spread over time.   In more advanced stages, Alzheimer's disease patients cannot communicate and can no longer swallow properly. oOther complications, such as pneumonia, may occur and the disease is life-threatening.

Most of us are afraid that one day we will suffer from Alzheimer's disease or that a family member will suffer from the disease. And although there is no cure for Alzheimer's disease, there are some steps we can take to reduce the risk of contracting it. And one of these ways is neuroplasticity and brain training. Education has been shown to counteract Alzheimer's disease.   In people with at least a high school education, the rate of dementia has dropped by almost half since the 1970s. Education and the resulting training of the brain lead to what we call cognitive reserves, which means that the brain can compensate for some of damage caused by Alzheimer's disease.

For the same reason, people who have learned a second language or an instrument in their teens also have a 30% lower risk of developing mild forms of dementia. This means that if you constantly try to learn new things throughout your life, you have a lower risk of developing Alzheimer's disease. Of course, there is still a risk because nothing in biology is absolute, but the risk is lower. Some people will still develop some form of dementia, but here too we can do something with some form of brain training.  For example, music therapy has been shown to cause neuroplasticity in patients with Alzheimer's disease.

In one study, the so-called Mozart effect was used to treat patients with dementia over the course of six months. Patients listened to Mozart in the morning and Pachebel at night and had to be tested periodically. The results showed that music therapy helped improve abstract thinking in patients with Alzheimer's disease.   Another study has shown that singing songs that are familiar or that the patient has known in the past can help improve self-awareness.  And then karaoke has also been shown to improve symptoms in dementia patients and that's a great thing. They are different forms of music therapy, but in general they improve the attention-memory orientation and executive function of patients with Alzheimer's disease.

But what I want to point out here is that there is also another very important factor of these therapies and that is the improvement of mood. Music therapies help reduce anxiety and depression in patients with dementia. It has been proven time and time again and the impact is very important. When starting music therapy, patients with Alzheimer's feel less secluded and interact more with their environment. And these interactions can also help train their brains.   It makes a lot of sense to receive these types of therapies and it is not my opinion, but they help improve the general mood and also help fight the disease itself.

So let's see how available they will be in the coming decades.  Although our brain stops growing once we reach adolescence, we can still positively impact the structures of our brain. We can try to learn new things, new languages, sports or hobbies and be creative. This helps us not only reduce the risk of developing certain diseases later in life, but it can also make us happy and that's all we want in the end, right? Damn, that was cheesy. But for now I hope you enjoyed this video. If so, feel free to like and comment on how you train your brain, let us know what's interesting or just post some random stuff, it's a free country.

And with that we'll see you! If you are interested in a similar topic where we discuss how a baseball accident turned a genius or how we could reverse aging, you might like these videos!